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Is AI Destined to Make Marketing — and Music — Worse? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 432)

MidJourney created image of robot in 1970s rock band to illustrate AI making music and marketing worse and better

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Is AI destined to make content, music, art, and marketing worse? Almost certainly. Truly. It’s also almost certainly going to help many people create many great works that they had neither the skills or access to create in the past. That’s the reality of new technology and new tools. As the quote says, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” Some of what AI offers will be amazing. Some will be will terrible. The key for marketers, business professionals, artists, and, frankly, everyone, is to learn how to use these tools the right way to help their customers — and humanity overall.

Why is AI destined to make things worse… and better? How can we use it well? And what do we need to do to make sure we shape AI’s destiny for better, not worse? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Is AI Destined to Make Marketing — and Music — Worse? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 432) — Headlines and Show Notes

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You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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Transcript: Is AI Destined to Make Marketing — and Music — Worse?

  Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 432 of The Big Show, and thank you so much for tuning in today.

I very much appreciate it. I think we’ve got a really cool show for you today, and full disclosure, this one may go a little long because it speaks to interests near and dear to my heart, and that is marketing and music, and the relationship between those. My, my good friend Mark Schaefer, and anybody who’s listened to the show before knows that I think the world of Mark, he’s one of the smartest people in the world of marketing today.

And he has a must read post about what he calls the real reason marketing content is getting worse. And he compares it to music. Now, long term listeners probably know that I was a music major in college and I started my career as a musician and a recording engineer before I got into marketing. So this one was like catnip for me.

, I was just like, oh, I can’t wait to listen to it and I can’t wait to talk about it. And I want to be very, very clear, right out of the gate, Mark is 100 percent right about why there’s so much crap out there. AI makes it easier and cheaper to produce content. As a result, more people make more content.

And many of those people either don’t take the time to make sure that they’re producing quality content, They don’t have the skills to produce quality content, or frankly, both. As a result, we’re seeing lower quality content. As Mark rightfully puts it, quote, We risk drowning in a sea of mediocrity. The craft of marketing, the human touch, the unexpected twist, the soul.

is in danger of being automated away. I could not agree more. It is tremendously easy for folks to create lots and lots and lots of mediocre or actively bad content. And that makes it tougher for you to stand out. In a sea of noise, it’s just harder to be seen and heard and recognized. I actually made a similar point way back in 2018 in an episode called Digital Makes Marketing Easier for Everyone, Which Makes Marketing Harder for Everyone.

So, this has been a topic that I’ve thought about a lot. Over the last couple of years, I also share his very real concern about providing younger marketers with the opportunities to learn and learn their craft better in an episode called Will AI Make Marketers Dumber Earlier This Year? Those are very, very real concerns and very real risks.

And shouldn’t be ignored in marketing, or in music, or anything else we do as creative individuals. And frankly, creative people as human beings. Creativity is such a core component of what we do. So up to this point, I completely agree. So you might be going, cool, what’s your beef then? What’s your point?

Really, there are three points that I want to make. One is that we need to keep growing and learning. We need to learn how to use these tools to our advantage. The second is that we need to help others do the same. And the third is that we need to give space for new ideas. Because ultimately, we’re not the customer.

We have to be willing to listen to what’s changing in the marketplace and changing in our customers worlds to support them. And I want to be fair, I don’t think Mark is suggesting don’t do that. I, in fact, I’m confident he’s not. It’s that we want to be very careful when we talk about, when things were better or how change can hurt, that we’re looking at both the pros and the cons.

Microsoft Mechanics www. microsoft. com I’ll give an example. Mark said, quote, When everyone relies on the same tools, you create a homogenized sound and a lack of diversity. He was talking about both music and marketing. Ironically, in the episode about one of Mark’s favorite topics, building a human brand in the age of AI that we did about a year ago, I mentioned one of my favorite YouTube music shows Mary Spender, who’s a bit of a protege of Rick Beato, the YouTuber Mark mentioned.

I am very familiar with Rick and his arguments. My issue with his arguments, his general argument, is that not everything was better years ago. The way we did things before can lead to stagnation. Or missing something genuinely interesting and novel DECA Records famously passed on The Beatles, Millennium Records rejected Madonna RSO, the Robert Stingwood Organization, passed on U2, and Def Jam Records, Signed and then dropped from the label, Lady Gaga, a decision Def Jam’s founder has called one of the worst decisions he’s ever made.

And that’s before we get into some of the terrible behaviors that existed in a world where gatekeepers existed. We need to remember the famous quote. That the customer is always right in matters of taste. We need to listen to our customers because the things that they hate, whether it’s music or marketing, isn’t going to work.

And the things that they love, even if we ourselves don’t love them, are going to work much better. And that’s true whether we’re creating our content with artificial intelligence or with human ingenuity. It’s just the way it works, right? Now don’t get me wrong, I love Mark’s taste in music. Anyone who name drops folks like John Batiste or Pat Metheny or Rhiannon Giddens or Mark Rebo has got, to my ears, Spectacular taste in music, but as marketers, we have to remember that the things we don’t like might still work for our customers.

They’re not us, and I have to touch on a point here that’s really important for anybody who’s listening and is over the age of, say, 30 or 35. As we get older, it’s tougher for us to get excited by the new. There’s research that shows that we love stuff we first encountered between the ages of 10 and 30 more than the things we’ll encounter at any other period in our lives.

It leads to something called the Reminiscence Bump, where art and music and film and fashion and a whole host of other life experiences we encounter during those formative years have greater, longer lasting impact than items we encounter before then or after then. We simply are wired to like the things that shaped us at certain points in our lives more than other things.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve talked about reverse mentors from time to time. These are younger colleagues who mentor more veteran professionals on technology, media, trends, things like that. They, they help you keep in touch and get exposed to new things. Maybe the thing we don’t like works for other people, for customers in different demographics or sociographic segments.

And our Reverse Mentors can be an important part of learning what resonates with audiences other than ourselves. For example, I think there’s a lot of great pop music out there, most of which I was introduced to by my Reverse Mentors. I’m thinking of people like Chapel Roan, or Sabrina Carpenter, or Zach Bryan, Casey Musgraves, Kendrick Lamar, Megan Thee Stallion, SZA, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo.

They’re producing, in my opinion, amazing work. That might take a little bit more exposure to get comfortable with if you’re outside the resuminescence bump period of your life. And that’s as true for people who are 40, as it is for those who, like me, aren’t 40. And let’s be fair, there’s a lot of crap, too.

What we have to remember is there’s always been a lot of crap. We remember the great stuff, not the crap. I looked at the top hits of 1984 on Wikipedia, which was right in the peak period of the reminiscence bump for me. I was a teenager. It was also a fairly great year for music. Given the number of songs you still hear from that period played, on Spotify and on the radio and in stores and restaurants and the like.

There are some absolute classics on that list. What would surprise you, if you looked, are there are also some, well, let’s call them not so much classics. Things like Twist of Fate by Olivia Newton John, or Think of Laura by Christopher Cross, or Time Will Reveal by DeBarge. They barely register in my mind.

And again, I loved music in that era. These were some of the biggest hits of a huge year in music, and I’m like, what? Huh? Meh. They just don’t stick because they were garbage. There’s another example that I point to all the time that Tina Fey once mentioned. She said, Saturday Night Live. We all remember the Saturday Night Live when we were in college because it was great.

It was the best. And Tina Fey has said Saturday Night Live was always terrible. Think about this. There are roughly 8 skits in every episode. They’ve had 968 episodes since the show started. And they usually have about 21 episodes per season. So that’s, if we take 8 skits and 968 episodes, That’s roughly 7, 700 skits across its 49 season history, or about 168 skits per season.

Now, how many of those do you remember? I can maybe think of a few dozen. I mean, let’s call it 100 in total, which is just a little bit over 1 percent of all the skits they’ve ever done. I suspect if you spend some time on this, maybe you’d come up with 100 or 200. That means that roughly 98 to 98. 9 percent are, at best, not very memorable, if not actively bad.

We just remember the classics, the ones that really stand out for us. And I’m sure if we think of the television commercials, or the radio commercials, or the print ads of that period, or whatever period was your youth, there is going to be some absolute classics that stand out in your mind. And most are going to be things you don’t recall, because there was a lot of crap in that era.

Two, which brings me to my next point and the next thing that I want to remind folks about and why I’m actually encouraged to a degree by the amount of garbage that’s out there. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but the reality is we live in a world now where there is more democratization of access to these tools.

According to Clay Shirky, the media scholar, publishing used to be an industry. Now it’s a button. That’s more good than bad. It doesn’t mean that there’s no bad. You’ve heard me say many times before that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. By creating more access to tools, more people can create.

Some of them are going to create garbage. Some of them aren’t going to know the difference in creating garbage. And some of them are going to come up with ideas and brilliant concepts that we might never have heard of. Whether that’s music or art or publishing or marketing or anything else. But they simply never had access to the tools before.

I told a story not long ago in a back and forth I had with some folks on Reddit. About starting out in recording studios, and how inexpensive computers and recording have opened up making music to an entire universe of people who would never have had a chance to make records. All of my mentors, everybody I worked with, worked on major label releases.

The engineer who taught me the most Had learned from Roy Halle, who’d won multiple Grammy awards working with Paul Simon and other artists in the 60s and 70s. And he’s in the Tech Hall of Fame, which is a hall of fame for record producers and engineers. I started out as a gopher. Then I was a second engineer under that guy for a couple of years before I was told I could call myself an engineer.

And it was another year or two of long shifts and lots of hands on experience, recording anything I could before I even started producing. The point is, before that, somebody had a door shut in my face. Anything that I did was done on cheap. , consumer quality gear that couldn’t possibly sound like a record.

You couldn’t possibly release it. It was just pure trash. The gear wasn’t good enough. So we were kind of capped out. And I knew too many people who were capped out because they didn’t meet some standard of getting in the door. One of those standards was money. Even the first semi professional studio I worked in The gear alone cost probably 100, 000, which would be roughly 250, 000 to 300, 000 adjusted for inflation.

Quality professional rooms had, were studios where the gear ran into the millions. In 1980s money, you couldn’t get your hands on pro quality gear without someone, a gatekeeper, letting you in the room. That isn’t necessarily a good thing, right? Because it created a whole environment where you couldn’t create.

Where you couldn’t explore, you couldn’t do things unless somebody let you in the door. And if you couldn’t hack it, if you couldn’t cut it, they’d shove you out the door just as quickly as they let you in to replace you with the 50 or 100 or 200 people who had their faces pressed against the glass hoping for a shot at getting in.

My point is that the old way prevented many, many people from ever getting an opportunity. Today’s marketers, folks who are trying to learn how to do this on the fly, without the gatekeepers, they lack the tutelage, they lack the training, they lack the teaching that I got from some of these world class engineers.

But they also lack the gatekeepers who are preventing them from getting their foot in the door. That’s a pro and a con simultaneously. Marketers are no longer getting yelled at for writing terrible copy or letting an AI do it. There are no gatekeepers, and that means that if you’re, like, a small business listening to this, you can do things that couldn’t have even been done 30 years ago.

That’s not necessarily bad. Yes, you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. No gatekeepers means some people who shouldn’t publish get to. And by, I mean, shouldn’t get to publish, I mean spammers and, and terrible folks who are trying to, Defraud customers, that’s bad, that’s actively bad, but creating the opportunities for folks who may not have had them before is a good thing.

And I think that’s why what we really need to focus on and what’s most important, and this I do come back to Mark in a big way because I agree with him entirely, is that we have to learn A, to listen to our customers. B, we have to learn to help others learn. And C, we need to cultivate judgment. We need to learn how to have great judgment, and we need to teach others to have great judgment.

AI can create. But not everything it creates is going to be good. Not everything it creates is going to work for our customers or for their taste. That doesn’t mean that it’s bad and we shouldn’t use it. It means we have to exhibit judgment. We have to exercise judgment. We have to help people who we encounter who maybe’s judgment needs a little bit of help to learn what makes for good quality and what makes for less good quality.

What’s better or worse. We need to do the work and especially teach our employees, our mentees, younger colleagues, other professionals who we encounter in the world and in the marketplace, how to think through the answers that artificial intelligence gives them, to know whether those answers are helpful, whether they’re true, whether they’re kind, whether they make a better reality for all of our customers.

Because machines Can’t do judgment, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s creating something that sounds like it existed in the 80s or the 90s or the 2000s, or if it’s creating something that sounds entirely novel and new. Judgment is going to matter. That’s a place we own. Better or worse are judgment calls.

It’s up to us to make sure we’re thinking through what better or worse means, what better or worse content and messages and experiences we’re putting out in the world, and whether we’re willing to live with the consequences of those judgments. Because ultimately, it’s not artificial intelligence that decides to release content.

We’re the ones who decide whether we put out something that’s great or something that’s crappy. We’re the ones who decide whether we’re going to try to create something that might go down as a classic. Or something that we put out there because we’re just trying to get a quick hit. AI is not destined to make music or marketing worse.

That’s our decision. The only ones we’ll have to blame, and that our customers and audiences should blame, for crappy content, for crappy music, for crappy marketing. is us. So let’s celebrate the demise of gatekeepers. Let’s use that to our advantage. Let’s ensure we’re thinking long and hard about what works for our customers and trying to explore and embrace the novel and new when it works.

Artificial intelligence can be an incredibly powerful tool. It’s our choice whether we use it to create something crappy, Or whether we use it to create classics. I can’t wait to see how you use it.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 423.

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, but I want you to know just how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so very, very much to me. You are the reason we do this show.

You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every week. You’re the reason we produce a new episode. So please, please keep listening, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

And with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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